The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Baroness Suttner (1843-1914) was a remarkable woman. Born Countess Kinsky in Prague, she belonged to one of the Habsburg empire’s most illustrious families. Her father having died before her birth, Bertha’s childhood was dominated by her nervous and impulsive mother, whose addiction to gambling soon squandered the remnants of the family fortune. The young countess was forced to earn her living, even though her aristocratic upbringing had prepared her for little more than life in elegant drawing rooms. Enterprising from the start, she attempted to make a career as a singer and then as a music teacher. But despite her accomplishments at the piano it was difficult to make ends meet, and so the young woman chose the only alternative left for one of her class: in 1873, aged thirty, she became a lady companion at the house of Baron von Suttner in Vienna. What followed seems to have sprung off the pages of a romantic novel. The young, poverty-stricken noblewoman fell in love with Arthur von Suttner, her employer’s son. Faced with stiff parental opposition, she fled temptation and moved to Paris where she answered a newspaper advertisement for a position as private secretary to a ‘wealthy elderly gentleman’ whose melancholy, cultured personality enchanted her. He was Alfred Nobel, the industrialist and inventor of dynamite. After a few weeks, however, passion got the better of reason and the Baroness travelled back to Vienna and eloped with Arthur.

  Penniless, the couple were in no position to choose their place of exile and went to the Caucasus (today Georgia), where a friend of the family had a country estate. Twelve years of hardship followed, during which Bertha tried to earn money by penning occasional pieces for Viennese newspapers and Arthur contributed his part by giving French conversation and riding lessons. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, Bertha was appalled to see the misery of war in wounded soldiers and civilians, and she turned her home in Tiflis into a makeshift hospital. The impression was so deep that she resolved to devote the rest of her life to promoting peace. By 1885 the couple’s financial situation and relations with the von Suttner family were sufficiently stabilized to envisage a move back to Vienna, where Bertha threw herself into writing an autobiographical novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Put Down Your Arms!), which appeared in 1889 and was an immediate bestseller. Her description of anguished wives and mothers and massacred soldiers, of lives and hopes destroyed in the name of glory and fatherland, touched hundreds of thousands of readers, and suddenly Bertha von Suttner was a household name. More than thirty novels followed.

  Apostle of peace: Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to be

  awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Inevitably, Baroness Suttner’s fame was controversial. Bourgeois morality often saw war not as a tragedy or even as a necessary evil, but as a healthy, invigorating mechanism of historical progress. A hundred years earlier, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had provided the rationale for this view: history is a continuous ascent towards enlightenment and freedom, and this progress manifests itself through the struggle of conflicting ideals whose collision creates something new and better. Peoples were the carriers of these ideals, the way that the Zeitgeist, World Spirit, chose to assert itself in history. Wars were therefore necessary for the progress of humanity, as a stronger, healthier, more advanced people imposed its culture and created new civilization, until its inevitable demise at the hands of another, even more advanced incarnation of the World Spirit.

  This view was deeply rooted in bourgeois morality, which judged a call to put down arms as nothing else but cowardice before the enemy, and before history. Enemies were as necessary to progress as night was to day. The crusading Baroness was ridiculed in the press: her earnest emotional appeals made an easy target, her constant lecturing and the stream of articles and novels from her pen made her look not so much a peace dove but a broody hen, busily laying literary eggs. She was an amateur. She did not understand. She was overwrought by grand ideas. She was hysterical. She was, after all, only a woman.

  At a time when social Darwinism and arguments from ‘natural law’ were all the rage, it is unsurprising that not only the opposition against Suttner, but also the arguments themselves were sexualized. Men were from Mars; women were from Venus. ‘Theoretically speaking,’ wrote the Austrian socialist leader Rosa Mayreder, ‘war is the utmost, terrible extreme of manliness, the last and most horrifying consequence of absolute masculine activity.’ Lida Gustava Heymann, a contemporary German suffragette and peace activist (a frequent combination at the time, as we shall see in chapter 9), took the logic one step further: women were from Venus, but they were trapped in servitude on planet Mars: ‘the male, destructive principle is diametrically opposed to the female, constructive one, which is based on mutual aid, on grace, on understanding and dialogue. In the modern, male, states, women have not only been deprived of any possibility of expressing their essential nature, they had to submit to the male principle, they were forced to recognize it, they were raped.’

  Undeterred by sexual politics, criticism and caricature, Baroness Suttner continued her campaign. Her platonic affair with Alfred Nobel had not ended with her flight back to her lover, and she had kept up a steady correspondence with the older man, who had become a father figure to her. ‘I wish I could produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible,’ he had told his secretary during her brief stint of employment with him, and his interest in peace and international arbitration was genuine. Conceived for use in engineering, in building tunnels, mines and roads, dynamite had also transformed warfare, and Nobel was acutely aware that a part of his fortune rested on destruction. He therefore resolved to devote his profits to the promotion of peace. In 1892 the two hatched the plan of awarding a prize in Alfred’s name to peace activists. Nobel died in 1896. In his will he bequeathed his entire fortune to a foundation to award prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace.

  In 1905 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Bertha von Suttner, who painted an apocalyptic portrait of conflict in the age of industrial warfare. In a future war, she claimed,

  all states [will be] ground to dust, all work will cease, all domestic hearths will be upturned, and only one cry will echo from border to border. Every village will be a holocaust, every city a pile of rubble, every field a field of corpses, and the war will rage on: beneath the waves torpedo boats are shooting to drag mighty steamers into the deep, in the very clouds armed and manned airships will rise against other airborne troops and mutilated warriors will fall from six thousand feet like bloody snowflakes.

  A Strange Champion for Peace

  If the pre-War years were a time of rampant militarism, they were also a period of intensive activity for peace. Suttner’s appeals were heard by a great number of people nervous about the accelerating arms race between the great powers and appalled at the ‘uncivilized’ spectre of wholesale slaughter. As the world appeared to be hurtling faster towards catastrophe with every passing year, there were important counter-cultures searching for or proclaiming different visions of society. In every county and every city there were peace activists, often (but not always) also supporters of women’s suffrage and socialism. The contrast between public warmongering and peace activism was strongest in Germany, which boasted the largest and most active peace movement in Europe. The Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (German Peace Society), founded by Bertha von Suttner and the journalist Alfred Hermann Fried, counted 10,000 members in Germany alone and was growing steadily, but the real support was much wider. Almost the entire following of the Social Democratic Party (which polled 35 per cent of votes for the German Reichstag in 1912) saw war as little more than a convenient way for the bourgeoisie to keep the workers down. A peace march in Berlin to protest against Germany’s hard-line stance in the Morocco Crisis in 1911 (one of many flashpoints for a possible world war) brought 100,000 people into the streets of the capital, with similar rallies in all major German cities. In September that same year, a huge crowd of 250,000 peo
ple assembled in Treptow Park in Berlin to demonstrate against war. At government level the Interparliamentary Union, almost exclusively made up of socialists, had 3,640 members in 1912, belonging to forty parliaments on three continents, including 157 German deputies, 141 from Russia and 516 from France, including such key political figures as Jean Jaurès.

  Despite the novels, the pamphlets and lectures, the congresses and agitation, the international peace campaign seemed unable to change the martial climate of European politics and even had to witness its rhetoric being used for the furthering of very different political goals. In 1898 the cause of world peace had received a helping hand from the most unlikely of allies: Tsar Nicholas II. In an unprecedented gesture, the ruler of all Russians had summoned the powers of the world to a peace conference to be held at The Hague the following year. The young monarch waxed lyrical about his newly espoused cause. Peace was an historic goal, he pointed out, and at the moment the great nations were getting no closer to it: ‘The ever-increasing financial charges strike and paralyse public prosperity at its source; the intellectual and physical strength of the nations, their labour and capital, are for the most part diverted from their natural application and unproductively consumed; hundreds of millions are spent on acquiring terrible engines of destruction ... National culture, economic progress and the production of wealth are either paralysed or perverted in their development.’ Neither Bertha von Suttner nor Karl Marx could have put it more eloquently.

  For all its florid enthusiasm, the Tsar’s appeal had a history that is nothing short of farcical. It had all begun with a solid piece of Russian espionage, through which General Alexei Kuropatkin, later tragic commander of the Russian forces in the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1898 minister of war, had learned that Austria-Hungary was planning to invest in rapid-firing field guns with a rate of fire six times higher than that of Russian ordnance. A glance at the depleted coffers of the war ministery made it abundantly clear that Russia would not be able to compete. Kuropatkin therefore hit on the felicitous idea of proposing an arms moratorium to the Austrians, Russia’s chief rivals. He submitted his cunning plan to finance minister Sergei Witte (then at the height of his powers), who pointed out with characteristic pragmatism that there was little in his deal to interest Habsburg’s ministers and that it would only serve to ‘reveal our weakness to the whole world’. Trying to console the soldier and his ally, foreign minister Count Muraviev, Witte spoke a little about modern ideas of peace and international negotiation, about the successive attempts at creating an international council of arbitration, and the call for an international peace conference. Ideas like these were little discussed among Muraviev’s aristocratic acquaintances and the prospect appeared entirely new to him. An international peace conference would not only solve Russia’s financial quandary, it would make Russia appear a benefactor of humankind.

  It would be almost impossible to convince the Tsar of the benefit of this strategy, Muraviev knew. Russia was governed through the military and Nicholas was never happier than when surrounded by soldiers. However, the Count was helped by the publication of The Future of War, a huge six-volume study written by a Polish Jew, the industrialist Ivan (Jean) Bloch (1836-1902). Having made a comprehensive study of military and technological developments and their strategic implications, Bloch had come to the conclusion that the classic war of the nineteenth century - army confronting colourful army on the battlefield in great, set-piece conflicts won by daring cavalry charges and individual bravery - was a thing of the past. After interpreting countless statistical data, national capacities and factors (down to the range and cost of artillery shells and the price of uniform buttons), Bloch was convinced that war would be industrialized and would depend on overall production capacities, railway lines and logistics, and all-engulfing conflict between national economies that could be won only once the opponent was economically exhausted, as all participants would be. Any military victory would also be national suicide, bringing collapse and revolution in its wake. The prospect of an inevitable socialist revolution in the event of war was enough to shake even the Tsar temporarily out of his dreams of glorious victory, and he decided to become a champion of international peace. An invitation by him would be impossible to refuse.

  The 1899 First Peace Conference at The Hague had taken place among great public excitement and profound scepticism on the part of the diplomats, as expressed in the words of a disgusted Count Münster, leader of the German delegation: ‘The Conference brought here the political riffraff of the world. Journalists of the worst type…baptized Jews like Bloch and female peace fanatics like Mme de Suttner ... All this rabble, actively supported by Young Turks, Armenians and Socialists into the bargain, are working in the open under the aegis of Russia.’

  Other delegates saw a more positive, even prophetic picture. Could this assembly of nations not be a first step towards a permanent structure - a federation of the states of Europe perhaps, or a league of nations? Could arbitration not result in establishing an international court of justice at The Hague, the place chosen for the Peace Conference? For the moment, these were distant visions, generously augmented by a public imagination running riot over proposals for world peace. ‘The queer letters and crankish proposals which come in every day are amazing,’ recorded the hard-bitten American ambassador, Andrew D. White. ‘It goes without saying that the Quakers are out in full force ... The number of people with plans, schemes, notions, nostrums, whimsies of all sorts, who press upon us and try to take our time, is enormous.’

  As the conference bogged down in realpolitik and negotiations about the minutiae of modern warfare and ethical slaughter, utopian schemes quickly receded into the background. Germany and Russia would not hear a word about limiting their armies (‘the German people is not crushed beneath the weight of armament expenditures…They are not hastening towards exhaustion and ruin!’ the German Colonel Gross von Schwartzkopf exploded at one point, puncturing the Tsar’s grand rhetoric), America would not agree to any limitation of naval ambitions, and Britain had taken the precaution of sending Admiral Jackie Fisher to prevent anything that could endanger the precious Dreadnought programme. Fisher distinguished himself as an outstanding dancer during social occasions. In committee, however, he alone insisted on giving the beat: ‘Thanks to the energetic attitude and persistent efforts of Sir John Fisher all provisions of the original articles which were likely in any way to fetter or embarrass the free action of the Belligerents have been carefully eliminated,’ a relieved First Lord of the Admiralty recorded.

  By the time that the conference drew to a close in July, it became apparent that all attempts at peace and disarmament had suffered shipwreck on the rocks of governmental intransigence. ‘Cold, cold are all hearts - cold as the draft that penetrates the rattling windows. I feel chilled to the bone,’ wrote a disillusioned Bertha von Suttner, always present at The Hague, in her diary, shivering, despite the mild summer weather. The Second Conference of 1907, called once again by Tsar Nicholas II, this time in an attempt to regain international prestige after the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War, was similar in outcome. ‘It was not a conference about peace, but about the customs of war,’ Suttner would lament, and she was right.

  Dionysus in the Tower

  The pacifist movement, working against the prevailing culture of war, military drill and compulsive manliness, was only one way of imagining different societies, different ways of living together. Every society has its dropouts, and every wealthy, rigid society (witness 1968) has its alternative cultures - usually predicated on the security they profess to despise. As the societies of Europe and the United States were struggling to cope with the explosive change transforming their lives, a vast number of alternative movements, prophets and fads sprang up, ranging from the admirably farsighted and profoundly scholarly to the eccentric and plain dotty.

  The original prophet of all these apostles of the New Life had come from Russia. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the writer and soc
ial reformer, had been fortunate to be able to enjoy both a simple life and peasant’s smock, and a large landed estate and income from his world-famous novels. Tolstoy’s vision of a life in harmony with nature was often criticized, but also very seductive to readers encountering his liberal ideas, amid the myriad strictures of middle-class life.

  These newfangled designs for living were often intertwined with bohemian lives and with one another, an ever-shifting landscape of spiritual leaders and assorted hangers-on, of mystics and scholars, charmers and charlatans. In Tolstoy’s own country this enchantment with the occult had penetrated the very heart of power in the person of Rasputin and the sway he held over the Tsarina and her circle, but outside the walls of Tsarskoe Selo there were other, more subversive groupings. On a popular level, there were charismatic Christian figures like Father Gapon; while in the political sphere the greatest excitement and debate were caused by the secular messianism of the socialists, communists and anarchists.